More-of-the-same-with-Mike Continuum
By: Brannon O’Brennan
The End
My brother’s body was found by his drug dealer on September 25, 2008. The dealer was a supposed friend, but later, when reading my brother’s texts, it became clear this “friend” was only tolerated because of his access to OxyContin. It was also clear that he was not a good dealer. He had problems getting paid, especially by my brother — a debt I think my brother still owed at the time of his death.
The day he found my brother, he had just dropped him off a fresh supply of Oxy. He had told a mutual friend he was worried that he wasn’t able to get in touch, and out of a strange sense of guilt, went back and broke through the condominium kitchen window. While standing there over the corpse in the kitchen, circled my brother’s hungry cat, he frantically dialed the number of my brother’s best friend from childhood - another user. He scream-cried through the phone.
“Oh my God, Paul. I think he’s dead. What do I do?” What else was said in the conversation I will never know. It was Paul who told me about this phone call, and I always assumed he probably left out any details that would have suggested complicity or guilt - personal or criminal.
The apartment was suspiciously clear of drug evidence, for an overdose. A police officer friend of mine told me - off the record - that the site had been likely cleaned up. But Mike had not been cleaned up. He had vomited and it was all over his face.
The autopsy report indicated that the body was received clad in the following items:
● “White T-Shirt (inside out)
● Pair of blue jeans with zipper half-fastened
● Pair of red, plaid boxer shorts
● One gray sock on the right foot which is torn.”
The funeral was difficult. I organized it with some help from my wife because I did not want my father to have to deal with it. I also remembered how badly he had managed my mother’s funeral three years earlier, arriving five minutes before the start and rushing to push-pin up crooked pictures of her from earlier, better times. To give the impression that a happy life full of happy events had occurred.
So I handled this one. The drug dealer attended. At that time I did not know for sure what his role was in the death. Most attendees were Irish. We don’t cry and the men don’t hug. My father had taken two powerful sedatives before the funeral, maybe just to make sure he stayed Irish throughout the funeral. The dealer cried and hugged a lot, and this made him stand out.
We met for the first time at the funeral. He hugged me and shared a few memories - like how he would give my brother rides and their guitar jam sessions. He said the picture of my brother giving the best man speech at my wedding, which was at the center of the memorial display at the funeral, made him lose control. I don’t know why he came in retrospect. Maybe just to not look guilty while feeling very guilty. Like when assassins in mafia movies attend their victim’s funerals because to do otherwise would raise questions. I was embarrassed for him. Definitely not Irish.
The Beginning
My brother Mike was a quiet, gentle child. I was more of a kid, often in trouble, but he was definitely a child. The house was violent in the early years. He was compliant and I was not, so I got most of the beatings. He was the favored child, I resented him for it, and I bullied him relentlessly. Looking back, I probably had severe anxiety as a child. But my explosions, and tendency to tell knee-jerk lies in response to interrogations, the classic reactions now well-known to be symptoms of childhood anxiety, were probably behind the difference in how we were raised. I realized this much later when my own child was diagnosed with anxiety and exhibited so many behaviors I remembered as my own. I was born just a few years too early.
As we got older the house became quieter. I’m not really sure what changed or why - maybe we got too old to hit. But it was in this second, more peaceful decade of life that my brother had changed. I have probably wasted a lot of time since his death trying to figure out what changed, why and when and the connection of those questions to his end state described in the autopsy report.
Mike was talented in ways I was not. Artistically gifted, a great musician and good poet. These talents became obvious in his teen years. That was when he started getting in trouble, fights, and drunken run-ins with police. Alcohol was a new variable in the equation of adolescence.
Sober he was quiet and timid. As a drunk, he was funny and brave, then obnoxious, then violent, then arrested. He would perceive slights and disrespect and then explode. Especially with cops. He would scream at them and call them fascists and other slurred incoherencies.
His nights that ended in police stations scared my mother, as she was always afraid of what the cops might do to him. Miraculously, he was never the victim of any police violence. Some of the cops in town knew him or their children went to school with him, so maybe they remembered the quiet polite kid from little league.
The end of each spiral was punctuated with a phone call from the police telling my parents to come pick up their son. My parents had no idea what to do about my brother and were afraid for him. I can see that now, but as a still adolescent I resented that he did not receive the harsher treatments I did for lesser offenses.
In Between
Mike attended college and gradually got a degree while also working for my father in his computer business. For years after, he continued to work for my father, though he never had a plan to either take over his business or leave and pursue something else. He appeared to just be marking time.
He did not like my father or working for him, and he was by his own admission a disrespectful and less than conscientious employee. By this time, police confrontations became less frequent. He had periodic drunken episodes, but in our small town, his friends or mine would intercede.
I didn’t like that my friends were assuming responsibility for him, especially when they were the occasional targets of his anger and never responded with the beating that they would have given anyone else. At my wedding he was the best man, and at the end of the night I had to break up a fight between him and another guest. The picture of him giving the best man speech that moved his dealer to tears was taken hours earlier. No one who remembers him at that wedding thinks about the speech. Funerals aren’t for honesty though; they are for painting tolerable versions of the past, so the event is a little less sad. It’s ok to be dishonest if it’s for a good cause and no one is harmed.
As I write this it occurs to me for the first time that like my parents, I also did nothing in response to his episodes up to that point. It is hard to believe now but I did not think about how obviously he was in trouble and never in control. For all but the very end of his life no one intervened or attempted to help him figure out what was wrong. Like most people in the world, he did not ask for help or maybe did not think he needed it, or maybe did not know how to ask. The conclusions I have are with the benefit of hindsight and knowing he would die, but during this time his periodic bursts were experienced like weather. Inevitable storms followed by calm. Sometimes entertaining, sometimes annoying, almost always both and in that order. He was loved despite himself by the friends and family who were most familiar with the episodes.
Mike was living at home with my parents when my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. By then, I had moved away and lived near Washington, D.C. Her death two years later had an especially strong impact on him. For two years, he had watched her agonizing decline and was with her every day until her last. He was noticeably more subdued after this and through the rest of his life when I saw him. Others who saw him asked me if I thought he was doing drugs. The answer in retrospect was yes, the answer given then was “I don’t know.” Even if I had realized it then I wouldn’t have been alarmed; it would have seemed to me consistent with the more-of-the-same-with-Mike continuum.
My brother and I inherited some money when my grandmother died about a year after my mother. He burned through it, maxed out a number of credit cards and managed to get a mortgage for a condominium that he could not make payments on. During this period of extra stress, he had to be taken to the hospital for alcohol poisoning more than once.
The eye-opening moment was when he totaled his car, which resulted in another hospital trip and now a DWI charge. When he woke, he called the police fascists, accusing them of faking the results of the blood test. But the judge was unconvinced.
At this point my father emailed me to let me know how bad things had gotten. By this time, Mike was drunk on a daily basis despite my father’s best efforts to find and throw out booze. Once the booze was exhausted my father mentioned to me that Mike was doing better but had a cold and was taking over-the-counter cough medicine. I knew that trick and had performed it myself, so I warned my father to throw out the medicine. It turned out he had no cold at all, but my father was unwittingly buying him bottle after bottle of a cough medicine that in large enough quantities would get him high.
Shortly after that he tricked my father into giving him $20 to get a nail removed from his tire. My father realized his mistake when Mike’s mood rapidly improved and he observed the cheap plastic flasks barely hidden under the mattress in the childhood bedroom that my brother had occupied continuously for thirty-five years. In the middle of all that my father had convinced my brother to accept professional help, which he stopped attending soon after he lost his car. I learned that his friends were now loaning him their cars and also money. At my father’s request I contacted the friends and let them know the severity of the problem to which they were unwittingly contributing. This didn’t stop the enabling, but my brother was very offended at what he saw as a violation of his privacy. He let me know that in an email that was the last direct contact I would have with him.
About two months before his death, he started the Oxy. I had an inkling but did not understand how dangerous the drug was. It was a new phenomenon then. Had I known how dangerous the drug was I like to think I would have taken some action, though I don’t know what. I probably could not have stopped him, but I know that today I would be able to tell myself I tried.
At 9:23 PM on September 25th, 2008, my phone rang. It was a hometown friend calling and I knew it was probably bad news. The same friend who had told me that he was using Oxy several weeks before. He struggled for several minutes to tell me my brother’s body had been found in his condominium.
15+ Years On
When my brother died I was sad for a lot of reasons, but one was the wasted potential. I felt like his life was put permanently on pause, rather than terminated, because there was something better for/from him that was still to come and still existed somewhere, like on another plane or in an alternate universe. I specifically had in mind his writing and musical gifts. But over the years as I think more about his life, I also think about what was most likely had he not died as a result of that specific binge rather than any of the ones that came before it, or the next likely one that would have followed a few days later. He had not to that point attempted to make a career of music or writing, and at age thirty-five, seemingly depressed and struggling to live a normal adult life, it is unlikely he would have. For an addict, the opposite of early death is not living a successful life where potential is realized. It’s staggering through the unsuccessful life that was possibly foreseen and avoided through early death. There was too much of whatever was wrong in my brother that had already hardened like concrete around his existence by this point.
I recall a couple bright points that I am grateful for, ahistorical aberrations that provide some comfort. One time he came down to visit me. Both drunk, I told him I was sorry for how I bullied him. He forgave me. Both drunk about a year later at my engagement party he told me he loved me.
Despite everything, my brother had positive, permanent impacts on me. He introduced me to music and books I would never have found by myself. Today, I opened a drawer to find an old CD he burned for me, etched with his immediately recognizable handwriting carefully listing the order of the songs.
He introduced me to many books, and to this day I continue to browse his collection, which I recovered from my father’s basement when he died in 2020. I have his copy of Walden. He was not particularly neat or conscientious with things he owned so I was surprised at the perfect condition of the book. I wonder if it was more important to him than other possessions, so he took better care of it. I would like to ask him about that. I re-read the pages he listed on the index card, trying to determine if it is a secret code to understand him and make posthumous communication possible. I would like to ask him why he cited the pages he did.
Many of the same songs my brother introduced me to made their way through me to my daughter who now listens to artists he introduced me to decades earlier. She and I spent a day listening to these songs last summer driving around the seashore.
At the time of his death my own children were 3-year-old twins. They probably don’t know it, but this newer family has been greatly impacted by the one that preceded it and the impact of my brother’s death. I am the sole link between the two and get to decide how the events of the first iteration impact the second, for better and probably worse, consciously, and unconsciously. I am closer to my children than my parents were with me. They are in their late teens, and I worry about them, scanning for any of the signs that would link them with the troubles that plagued the uncle they can’t remember. Both children are much better than I was at their age in every way and sometimes I give myself credit for it without being sure of whether I had anything to do with it or if I am ignorant of any damage I have unwittingly done reacting to old wounds that now, with my parents and brother dead, only live on in my head.
I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say I was a contributing member to the unsuccessful first family. I did not like my father and was not close with my brother over the years. My father and brother did not like each other. Those dynamics made it harder to give or ask for help. The die was cast early, and everything stayed on course in a way that makes sense when viewed from a distance. Sequenced and logical.
As I write this, I still don’t feel like I understand fully what happened to my brother beyond an obvious, mundane explanation: He was born with tendencies for substance abuse and depression. Life stress (mother’s death, financial) made it acute at the end of his life. A dysfunctional family was not able to provide him resources and support, he switched to a highly addictive substance towards the end, enabled by a new relationship with a supplier, and friends who themselves overused drugs and alcohol. Just because he’s my brother doesn’t mean he gets a special story. There may be nothing more to know. Or nothing more I can know.
My father died in 2020. As I was cleaning out his home I found the urn with my brother’s ashes in a cabinet. Hidden away and not easily discovered, never scattered. Now I had two sets of ashes. I knew that my father wanted his ashes scattered over the same state forest where my mother’s ashes were dispersed. But my brother’s ashes came without directives. I tried to anticipate what his ghost would have wanted. His dislike for my father bordered on hatred, but I could not imagine separating him from where our parents would now both be.
I then thought that dead people don’t want anything, and I was making unnecessary work for myself by speculating. I decided that I would mix and scatter them both in the same forest with my mother, about three hundred miles from my current home. There are no longer planes that drop ashes, so I emptied my gym bag and loaded it up with the urns and walked them up a steep hill thoroughly shrouded in leafy green oaks, beeches, and pines. Heavy work to be sure. It was July and I was covered in sweat. I spread the mix evenly under a couple trees that I judged secluded enough. Ashes don’t care.
Brannon O’Brennan is a writer from Washington, DC. He has been published in Isele Magazine, Cinnabar Moth Literary Collections, and George Washington University Press. His literary fiction story “Symbiosis” will be published in Secant Publishing's upcoming climate anthology. He also has a forthcoming short story collection through Alien Buddha Press.
